For the 2012 Maker Faire, five high-school students from the Bay Area have embarked upon an awesomely ambitious project: to construct a homemade flight simulator depicting the cockpit of a Viper from Battlestar Galactica. After launching a successful Kickstarter campaign, the team produced this video showing off their progress:

The basic idea is to mount the fuselage of a small plane (a Piper PA-28) on a motion control platform that is capable of 360 degree rotation on both the pitch and roll axes. The video above shows the basic design we're shooting for. This design allows for considerably more motion around the pitch axis than commercial entertainment systems, such as those found at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum [...]

We found the Piper fuselage in an airplane scrap yard, cut it to fit the proposed frame, and installed a racing seat with six-point harness. We used Autodesk Inventor software to design the frame, acquired the steel to build it with, and sent the steel to a local fabricator for professional welding.

Battlestar Galactica flight simulators — keeping youth off the street and away from Starbuck-like behavior since the frak if I know. You can check out their weekly progress here and see their past projects — like a reproduction Samus Aran battle suit from Metroid — here.